Fascism Is the Other Side of Postmodernism

Trump exhibits all the traits of a postmodernist. He treats legal, social, and moral conventions as mere constructs that he can violate at will. He has contempt for objective truth and lives in a reality of his own making. He ceaselessly broadcasts self-aggrandizing narratives with the same confidence that transgenders assert their delusional gender identities.

This not what the promoters and apologists of postmodernism promised. The critique of truth and knowledge production was supposed to undo the marginalization of the marginalized. The great promise of postmodernism was pluralism.

Apparently, no postmodernist was able to foresee that the demolition of Enlightenment rationalism might open a door to what preceded the Enlightenment: the rule of brute force. This was relatively long in coming because for most of its life postmodernism has had a distinctively queer orientation. The idea that you can legitimately believe anything you want to believe as long as your "lived experience" and feelings incline you to believe it originated in feminism. 

Trump reveals that opening the door to irrationality allows more than shrill harpies with pink hair and angry men in dresses to pass through. Fascism can come through that door as well. 

Trump as symptom

Trump may be a Republican president but he should be understood as the product of the degeneration of both parties and, more broadly, as a symptom of a ruling class in crisis. Without the collusion of a party that had the audacity to nominate the word-salad spewing, DEI-darling Kamala Harris as a replacement for the senile Biden, Trump would never have come to power. What is significant is that these were the only two options the ruling class could scrape from the bottom of its barrel. The European elites are similarly hard-pressed. The EU is led by vain morons.

Capitalism has consequences. One of them is the inexorable imbecilization of the bourgeoisie. The old slogan "socialism or barbarism" has never seemed more apt. Barbarism is many things, cruelty and violence foremost, but also the mental vacuity, the headlessness, that turns ostensibly rational animals into destructive automata.

Silly Art for Silly People

The Dadaist breakdown of the distinction between "art" and "nonart," did not "democratize" art. It magnified the power of the institutional arbiters who cater to elite pretentions. When someone duct-tapes a banana to a wall and calls it art, validation depends on the concurrence of these arbiters.  Avant-garde antiart gestures have always been expressly designed to offend common sensibility. Antiart manufactures uncommon art. The purpose of uncommon art is to make the people who consume it feel uncommon.

The myth of an anti-bourgeois avant-garde hides from view the collusion of the avant-garde with its bourgeois patrons to create a new class of luxury goods with no intrinsic value other than their snob appeal. If one wanted to be reductive, that would be the "real" meaning of modern art, but modern art also gave a wider audience new forms of elegance and aesthetic pleasure. The one myth that ought to be laid to rest is the myth of the subversive character of the avant-garde's output. The truth is that the notion of an avant-garde was always misleading, a fashionable mystification. The avant-garde did not lead, it followed. It supplied what a new upstart class needed to mark its cultural arrival.

When the bourgeoisie was revolutionary and heroic, avant-garde art was revolutionary and heroic. When the bourgeoisie degenerated, the avant-garde degenerated with it. We call this postmodernism.

The curse of the rich and powerful is that they raise spoiled feckless children incapable of appreciating or renewing the gifts they inherited. The contemporary avant-garde caters to these spoiled children, who first came to prominence in the 1960s. They like looking at bananas taped to walls. They like playing with gender and identity and inventing new pronouns. They and the artists who cater to them are incapable of inventing anything else. Contemporary art is silly because it caters to silly people.

Art delivers whatever is demanded of it. When serious people come around again, we will get serious art.

YEAH YEAH YEAH

I got involved with art because in art I found joy. I found self-abandonment.

And yet, for the last 30, 40 years, power is all the dried-up prunes who rule the academic roost want to talk about when they look at art.

The majority of credentialed art historians today hate art. They want to deconstruct it, unpack it, demystify it, and, ultimately, kill it. They're on a mission to convince everybody, but primarily themselves, that great art is a fiction, that inspiration is a scam, that the piercing joy with which genuine art wounds the heart is but a tool of male domination. Their sterile emptiness condemns them to an obsession with power, and anyone whose overriding craving is for power is incapable of appreciating art because art is humbling not empowering. The experience of art is similar to the experience of the sacred: it demolishes the ego, it plunges you into the abyss of your nothingness, in the depths of which you can, for a moment, experience a blissful connection to everything. 

There is no question that in order for canons to be renewed they must at various intervals be upended. But that upending must be at the hands of newer, more vigorous artists whose destructive gestures are necessary to release a living tradition from the dead encrustations that are strangling it. Academic deconstruction is something else altogether because it is purely intellectual and allied with a neurotic hatred of what the intellect cannot apprehend or circumscribe.

Fortunately, art abides. Maybe not in au courant galleries and museums, desperate as they are to display their abjection to the latest "transgressive" trend, which in every instance turns out to be yet another genuflection in front of some well-worn liberal cliché. No, art lives elsewhere, in the cultural vortexes that occasionally and unpredictably form within the smooth flows of commerce and entertainment.

Art survives now by disguising itself as something too dumb to be taken seriously.